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Broberg was born sometime on 1962. At the age of six, she began showing an interest in acting and participated in small theater shows. When she was ten years old, she began to look up to Robert Berchtold, who moved into her neighborhood, and he eventually became a second father to her. Two years later, in 1974, she was drugged and abducted by him when he took her horseback riding with permission from her mother. Not knowing that she had been abducted by Berchtold at the time, Broberg was brainwashed by him while he was in a separate room, being led to believe that she had been taken by aliens for a purpose and that she was a very special child. After being missing for nearly a month, Broberg was found by the FBI in Mexico and returned home, while Berchtold was arrested and placed in a mental hospital. During the next two years, she spent life under the fear that her family would be targeted and killed due to the brainwashing. Eventually, Berchtold was released and subsequently abducted her again, taking her to California and placing her in a Catholic school, tricking the nuns working there that he was a CIA agent and that Broberg was an escapee from Lebenon during the 1958 crisis there. Berchtold would also sexually abuse her during her captivity.

After being held captive for four months, Broberg was rescued again, although she was no longer the same afterwards, being plagued by the brainwashing. This resulted in her going under a deep depression and having suicidal thoughts. Eventually, Broberg began testing the credibility of the brainwashing, and after finding that it was all untrue, began to emerge back into society. Her mother then took Broberg's 900-page FBI report, turning it into a book titled Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story. Broberg continued acting, viewing it as some sort of therapy for her trauma. As an adult, she became an actress. She appeared in over a dozen feature films, including Slaughter of the Innocents, Poof Point, Message in a Cell Phone, The Secret Keeper, Bug Off, The ButterCream Gang, Hope For Troubled Teens, Nadir, Family First, Little Secrets, Mobsters and Mormons, The Book of Mormon Movie, Vol. 1: The Journey, and Baptists at Our Barbecue. She also appeared in many TV series, including Touched by an Angel, Promised Land, Remember Me, Death Row, The Man With Three Wives, Harmful Intent, Siege at Marion, Taking of Alta View, Ancient Secrets of the Bible, Everwood, and Criminal Minds. In 2012, Broberg portrayed Rita, a character who is bound, tortured, and eventually scalped, in Maniac.

Broberg portrayed Lauren Morrison in the Season Nine episode The Return. Her appearance in the episode may have been a reference to her childhood abduction, since the episode deals with an abductor whose M.O. involves brainwashing his victims into complete obedience. This can be further supported by the fact that her character has a son who is one of the victims in the episode.